This results in a release build being submitted to QA at the end of an iteration that is smaller but of a higher quality.

Upcoming Iteration #3:

Review and planning session to be conducted on Friday February 22 and Monday February 25.

Iteration #3 starts on Tuesday February 26.

Firefox Mobile

Current Releases

Fx19 Shipped: https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Fennec/19/RC/1
Lightweight themes, Expanded ARMv6 support and Support for zh-TW and zh-CN are some of the highlights. We also worked on the streamlining Session Restore, cleaned up the way we store Favicons and Thumbnails, and added History expiration. The UI was tweaked in several places, including About:Home and the Awesomescreen. Content rendering was also greatly improved with: Tile-by-tile drawing, Low-res tiles and Mitigated locking.

We are hitting many DB related crashes during the upgrade. It's difficult to figure out when some of the crashes are happening, but others are definitely happening during the DB upgrade. Risk mitigation meeting is happening today at 1PM Pacific in the Mobile Vidyo room. bug 791958, bug 829927, bug 752828

Beta (64)

More UI refinements were uplifted to Aurora late last week and will hit Google Play with Beta 1 coming up this Friday: bug 837113 - Provide UI for closing tabs [closing tabs button has been removedbug 841567 - Thumbnail title unreadable on tabletsbug 831021 - Toolbar curve jumps 4px on tab slide animation

Aurora (54)

Stay tuned...

Nightly (65)

The highly anticipated scrolling of the nav bar off the top of the screen has been green-lighted by UX and patch is under review bug 716403

Mobile

We are watching for the various Startup crashers in 19, with 1 SUMO thread so far. Input doesn't show any spikes (as we would expect) and Google Play lacks good STR/Info. We will still monitor this closely.

UX & User Research

Market Insights from the Product Marketing Strategy Team

Desktop / Platform

Google

Google Chrome will soon offer support for a (at present, Google-only) file synchronization service. Web app developers will be able to seamlessly use Google's services to store data, letting users use apps on multiple devices more easily.

Tizen

The final Tizen 2.0 SDK has been released -- the alpha version was released in the fall of 2012. Highlights include an enhanced HTML5 web framework, APIs for Bluetooth and NFC, and a full WYSIWYG Web IDE for development.

WebKit

There is some evidence that Apple may be upstreamingsome of the changes they have made to WebKit in their private iOS branch.

Mobile

International calls through Skype are equivalent to one third of global international phone traffic. In 2012, growth in the 490 billion minutes market for international calls was only at 5%, compared to the growth on cross-border Skype-to-Skype traffic of 44%, reaching 167 billion minutes.

Opera acquired Skyfire, a mobile browser and mobile network optimization solution. Called Rocket Optimizer, the offering for network operators reduces network overload by caching videos and large images in the cloud and serving them compressed to the network. The company claims that video represents 2% of user requests and 50% of bandwidth used. Skyfire Horizon is a browser extension platform that network operators can add to devices as a toolbar and means to promote their offerings.

The first testing version of Ubuntu for phones, the Touch Developer Preview, will be available on the 21st of February (tomorrow) and optimized for flashing on the Galaxy Nexus by Samsung and the Nexus 4 by LG. Canonical revealed the interface for the tablet version of the Ubuntu mobile platform, that is expected to make it into version 14.04, to be released in April 2014. It supports screen sizes from 6 inches to 20 inches and resolutions from 100 to 450 pixels per inch. Large screen optimizations include support for multiple user accounts.

Samsung launched a new line of smart - light phones, the Rex series, for the emerging markets. Based on Java, they feature Samsung's TouchWiz interface (also used on Android), Google search and Google Talk, Facebook, Twitter. There are 2 browsers: Opera Mini and Access NF.